Now that the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ (VoC) hype has passed, students of capitalist diversity are searching for new directions. My co-edited book (with Matthias Ebenau and Christian May) entitled New Directions in Comparative Capitalisms Research presents the first sustained dialogue between institutionalist ‘post-VoC’ and more critical, global approaches, thus contributing to the development of a new generation of Comparative Capitalisms scholarship.
The volume is now available in paperback and is explicitly designed to build on paradigmatic debates about varieties or models of capitalism via the much more explicit incorporation of critical and global perspectives into the discussion. Moreover, it is edited with the possibilities for teaching in mind, especially as this generation of students – socialised by years of crisis, conflict, debates about inequality, etc. – are less persuaded by approaches such as Peter A. Hall and David Soskice’s farmework in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, which tends to downplay these essential aspects of the post-2008 world.
Finally, the book is balanced between theory and empirics, containing a number of chapters comparing and contrasting different conceptual approaches to the issue of capitalist diversity and a number of case studies drawn from around the world.
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